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PUBLISHED WEEKLY. NEW YORK, TUESDAY, AUGUST 6, 1895. FIVE CENTS A COPY.
GREAT MEN'S SONS.
THE SON OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT.
BY ELBRIDGE S. BROOKS.
He sat under a gorgeous canopy upon the gleaming portico of the palace of the kings at Babylon, and clapped his hands, and crowed his praises, and laughed aloud in glee, as spears were tossed and shields were clashed aloft, and soldiers shouted and generals saluted, and princes of vassal nations bowed themselves to the ground in homage and admiration--all in honor of this very small boy with a very great name. For he was Alexander, the Shield, the Great Lord, Blessed, That liveth forever. He was constitutional King of Macedon, Captain-General of Greece, Lord of Egypt, and monarch of Asia. He was the son of Alexander, King of Macedon, called by men the Great and Conqueror of the World.
But Alexander the Great was dead. And in the palace of the kings whose empire he had conquered, the palace in which Belshazzar had feasted and Cyrus had ruled, and in which the all-conquering Macedonian had died at thirty-two, this helpless baby, less than a year old, and who had never seen his father of the mighty name, held the sovereignty that Alexander the Great had established.
It was a vast possession. It stretched from Greece to India, from Egypt to Siberia; it was such as only a genius could have conquered and only a genius could rule. With Alexander dead and only a baby as its lord it was already in danger. But Roxana the Queen said, boldly, "My boy shall be King," and all the "Companions of Alexander," as his generals and ministers were called, echoed her words: "The boy shall be King!" And so it came to pass that at the great display in Babylon the little son of Alexander was honored and sainted and adored as the successor of his imperial father.
Gradually the quarrelling generals who were fighting for the possession of Alexander's empire were reduced, by victory or death, to five. And of these five the most ambitious and determined was Cassander, the regent of Macedon. He hated Alexander the Great; he hated the son of Alexander; for the father had slighted him when living, and the son, by living, stood in his way. He had determined to be the head of the empire, and he did not rest until he had forced his rivals, the fighting generals, into a bitter quarrel for supremacy, that led to a long and bloody war.
It was during this war that little King Alexander's grandmother, the Princess Olympias, set out to punish Cassander. While he was fighting in southern Greece, she gathered an army in northern Greece and attempted to invade Macedon and get possession of its capital city, Pella. But Cassander was a shrewd young general; he seized all the ships he could get together and sailed up the AEgean Sea so quickly that before Olympias knew it he had landed his army and got between her and the road that led to Pella. Thereupon the old Princess, being afraid to risk a battle, shut herself up with her slender army and the little Alexander and his mother in the city of Pydna, an old town of Macedon lying at the head of what is now called, on your map of Turkey in Europe, the Gulf of Salonica. It is in the walled town of Pydna that, in the year 316 B.C., we get our second brief glimpse of the son of Alexander, now a little boy of seven.
It was a beautiful spot in which that old town of Pydna was built; it stood three miles from the sea, in a fair and fertile region, and almost in the shadow of that grand old hill Mount Olympus, the home of the gods of Greece.
It was anything but a beautiful home for little King Alexander, however, when he found himself locked behind its thick walls. For Cassander, the Macedonian, marched his soldiers against it, and dug a great trench all around it, and set up all the dreadful old-time war-engines about it, and determined either to batter down its walls or starve out its inhabitants.
It was a terrible siege. Provisions gave out, and poor little Alexander went to bed hungry many a night. The horses, the mules, and the dogs were killed for food. The great war-elephants, having nothing to eat but sawdust, grew too weak to be of any use, and, with their useless drivers, were killed and eaten by the soldiers.
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